ANHO Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI) Perspectives Peer Responses
Question Description
1A professional presentation can be quite intimidating on a personal level due to the makeup of the audience. For me, personally, presenting to an audience of my peers whether it be fellow students, friends or coworkers is easier than presenting to management and other stakeholders. This would probably be my greatest weakness in a professional presentation, not becoming intimidated by those in the audience. To help combat this issue I believe interacting with the audience prior to beginning my speech would be beneficial to help ease my nerves. Getting the opportunity to chat and do a little meet and greet with those that will be sitting in the audience could help dispel the separation of management and stakeholders and just turn them into “normal” people to me. Talking to someone face-to-face or one-on-one can help to give you a personal connection and assist (at least me) in viewing them as less intimidating (Kim, L., 2014).
A personal strength of mine regarding a presentation is my ability to appear (whether it Is true or not) calm and easily relatable. I am able to transform any possible nervous energy I have and use it as enthusiasm for what I am presenting. I have been told on multiple occasions that I seem so calm and knowledgeable in specific topics or presentations due to my calm demeanor when in truth I was as nervous as can be prior to beginning. Some may do this by giving themselves a big boost in caffeine right before the presentation, I am not a huge caffeine drinker so I manifest my energy by giving myself a little pep talk right before I begin. Working to reassure myself that I know and am confident in the information that I am presentation helps to give me a little boost of energy as well as an added confidence in what I am saying (Kim, L., 2014).
2I have made presentations before in front of small audiences. My attitude depends on if I know the room very well. If it was my class I tend to feel more comfortable and have less anxiety. With a crowd of people I don’t know I worry about how they will like me, and I worry about messing up the entire time. I think that my biggest strength is that I have an outgoing personality and I like talking to people, and engaging with them. Making the presentation more of a conversation makes it more useful and interesting for the audience. This enables the presenter to involve the audience with questions and can really have the room engaged in the topic at hand (Doyle, 2016). Once I get going my nerves calm a little and I can focus on the details of my presentation.
I would say that my biggest weakness is anxiety before my presentation. I try to go as soon as possible. Because, if I wait to go I sit there and my anxiety increases about how I am going to do. This takes away my attention from the presenters that I should also be listening to. So, I try to go up as soon as possible so I can go up and present my material. I have already prepared beforehand and know what I want to say. So it is better to get it out of the way so I can focus on the rest of the presentations after I have finished mine.
3Public presentations aren’t a topic that I typically struggle with, however, as with any topic, there is always room for improvement. One topic that I feel I can improve upon regarding public presentations is practicing; after all, practice makes perfect. At one point in my career, I had to present on a topic in a round robin format; in other words, there were three different presentations going on at the same time and each group in the conference center would change rooms every half hour until every group had seen all three presentations. Drawing from this experience, I recognize that my later presentations were better, more concise, and I was more relaxed. This demonstrated to me that even though I felt relaxed, there was something to be said about actually delivering the presentation that made if flow more cohesively. Kim (2018) emphasizes that recording your presentation may allow you to critically evaluate areas that need work and even clue you in on bad habits that you may not be aware of. With this being said, some ways that I can improve upon this topic is by recording my presentation and practicing the presentation out loud along with the PowerPoint slides or other media that I plan on using. These efforts should help mitigate this issue and allow me to consistently present upon a topic.
Alternatively, one topic that I would consider a strength is that of organizing my thoughts on one centralized topic. I try to stay consistent to this in efforts to not deviate too far off topic and into territory that I may not be as well versed in. Some of the best presentations revolve around a single focus- sometimes even needing to be narrowed down from an event broader topic (Heinrich, 2012). With this, I find that my strength lies
